I tend to find Rob Sherman a bit of a gadfly, but he’s also often correct.  Eric Zorn has a round-up of funds going directly to religious institutions for what are not solely secular purposes:

 

Here are the three worst examples of blatantly unconstitutional expenditures that I’ve found, so far:

On page 170, a grant of $700,000, your tax dollars, to St. Malachy School for “costs associated with capital improvements.” There can’t possibly be a single legislator in all of Springfield who doesn’t know that Article X, Section 3, of the Illinois Constitution prohibits grants of tax dollars to parochial schools, yet there are dozens of similar grants throughout the Bill.

On page 54, a grant of $150,000, your tax dollars, to Keshet for “costs associated with construction of a cabin at Camp Chi,” a Jewish camp IN WISCONSIN!  It’s bad enough that the legislature is making unconstitutional donations to religious organizations, but now they’re making donations to religious facilities in OTHER STATES!  Hey, I went to Camp Chi one year in the ’60s.  It was right around when I was Bar Mitzvahed.  It’s a great camp, but you can’t go taxing people to support a place where children are sent to have a religious experience, particularly when the place is out-of-state!

Here’s the most outrageous of them all:  On pages 335 and 336, a grant of $140,000, your tax dollars, “to Catholic Bishop of Chicago” (that’s Cardinal George) “for general infrastructure at St. Martin de Porres Church.”

 

My only criticism is of this comment:

There can’t possibly be a single legislator in all of Springfield who doesn’t know that Article X, Section 3, of the Illinois Constitution prohibits grants of tax dollars to parochial schools, yet there are dozens of similar grants throughout the Bill.

I’m betting there are many.

More to the point, these sort of funds are very different from allowed grants that go to religious institutions that are providing social services.  In those cases they cannot discriminate and they must not actively proselytize while providing services.  Obviously, a church and a Catholic school are all about proselytizing and thus it’s an inappropriate use of public dollars.

The Jewish camp in Wisconsin is bizarre by even Illinois pork barrel project standards.